altezzaclub

Here's step one- stock dizzy. If you've never seen under the plate, it looks like this. First photo has the rotor shaft off the dizzy's cam drive shaft. Second photo has it assembled. Those are the springs that control the rate of ignition advance, as those two centrifugal weights move outwards and turn the rotor shaft on the shaft inside it. That turns the rotor more, relative to the cam/crank and works the points earlier, so the spark arrives earlier. You would think that the weights move out to take up the gap and stop advancing when they hit the vertical tabs... but no, max advance is done with the rotor shaft in the 2nd picture having pins into slots of the base below! So, in the third picture you can see the rotating shaft's pins enclosed in red plastic sitting through the base plate slots. (well, one of them anyway) So to get more max advance you file the slot longer. The pin moves 3.4mm in the slot, and they are 24mm apart. So they sit on a circle of pi*24=75mm, and 3.4mm is 4.5% of that, which is 16deg, so max advance is 32 crank degrees... just what I measured yesterday! You can see that the weights and springs control the rate that advance is added, and the slots control the max spark advance you can get. On top of that, the vac advance pulls the points plate around, and ALSO adds and substracts advance. now to get it happening sooner...

AhA! When you do run it Jono can you post your results in this topic please- http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/49425-modified-ignition-curves/page__pid__507575#entry507575 It will be interesting to see what happens with faster advance low down. beerhead, Camerondownunder also remarked that the electronic dizzy was curved for a van, so it has no get up & go. In a topic late last year about electronic dizzys.

Do you guys want to generate a timing curve on your dizzys?? We should get a dozen different ones for comparison. I turned the motor with a 19mm spanner to get the timing mark on 20deg, then marked the pulley with a white-out liquid correction pen around clockwise. Then I turned it backwards some more until my 20deg mark was at 20deg on the timing chain cover and marked another 20deg worth, so I had marks on the pulley from zero to 40deg. I held the timing light & my wife worked the throttle and wrote down the readings. Not hard to do, every 500rpm up to 3500 with and without the vac advance. I nearly shat myself when she revved it up past 4000 and it ran off the end past 40deg! It hit 50deg I'm sure!

That's exactly what I found Evan, from the moment I first drove it with the new dizzy. Flat under 3500, so I just turned the advance up until it went fine around town. I could pull both dizzys apart and compare. Someone will know all about it..

I have moved along and fitted an electronic dizzy, one that KE Motorsport sells. Certainly cleaner at low revs or when cold, and I just added advance until it felt OK. Today I plotted an ignition curve, and I found I was running 18deg static advance to make it get up and go! So I've reduced it back to 8deg and plotted this- One set of figures with the vac unit on, one with the vac unit disconnected, and a Piper dizzy chart for comparison. That is what the Honda Accord uses, and is similar to the other dizzys mapped here- http://www.jcna.com/library/tech/tech0015.html I think the car feels much better with more advance early on, and I wondered who has had theirs re-mapped, what the curve looks like, and who really knows what changing the curve does in each sector... Thge fgures I read were similar to Camerondownunder's specs, 9.5deg at 1700rpm and 13.5deg at 3100rpm, so maybe K dizzys just don't work... http://www.rollaclub.com/board/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=68403

Any ideas on the differences in advance curves??

lol! Can't see that happening in Cape Town... "Hey that's my ute, BOOM! chk chk..." The best one would be to lift the tarp and a giant dog reaches out and rips your arm off. I saw a guy reach into a woman's car in a plaza carpark as she got in and grab her handbag. His mate was in a Subaru and they hit it as soon as they realised I had watched him. I chased them to the exit but being criminals they had no compunction about driving down the wrong side of the road to get out and vanished. That's the problem with the cops and the politicians, they don't realise that criminals don't obey their laws!

I took the springs out of another car, which make mine 60cm front and rear on stock 13" tyres. I 'm pretty sure they're just cut stock springs, and the ride is quite firm with them. That is measured from the ground to the highest point of the arch, and it doesn't look lowered particularly, unless you see it beside a stock KE70 and realise how high the rear usually is..

OK, I marked the pulley out to 40deg... not enough it seems! :o I was running with 18deg static, having just added advance w/o reading it out on the road yesterday, so the first measurements went off scale. Then I knocked it back to 15deg, read the advance and have subtracted 7deg off all the readings as I've taken it back to 8deg now. (and it feels a bit flat for sure) This is sitting in the driveway, so it doesn't count throttle demand just empty revs. I'm sure 3500rpm going up a hill has a different vac curve. The 4000rpm reading I judged to be 43deg, as it was 50deg at the time on 15deg static! You can see the vac adds more advance the higher the revs get. I'm wondering if the SU port works like any other carb, or does it have a different effect with the floating piston and keeps adding vacuum. To get 3500rpm in neutral wouldn't open the piston very high. It certainly doesn't mind lots of static advance, maybe a bit of the 2500ft altitude and the ground cam, but it would be a worry going up a hill foot flat at 110kph. I'll ask everyone when I've though some more.

Ported Felix, on one SU carb. I've been at it today for a quick timing light curve shows 18-20deg up to 3000rpm with no vacuum line, and with a vac on it kicks off at 18deg 1000rpm, 1500rpm, then hits 20deg at 2000, 25deg at 2500 and 30deg at 3000. I fitted the hose while it was at 2000rpm and you could see the timing jump 5deg. I can check manifold vac effects over the weekend, and also grab Rob's vacuum guage to check what the SU port does. I'm just about to mark the pulley carefully and re-do the curve, as I had to "measure by eye" the degrees over 20.... Once I have it pinned down I'll put up a post and have a think about it.

That's a pretty good list Towe.. Sinister there is a thread called the ultimate overheating thread or something like that- Why pull the head unless the gasket is blown? ..and if you haven't confirmed its blown do that first. First symptom is a car hard to start in the morning first time, then fine all day after that. (water leaks into the cyl as it cools at night and condenses on the spark plugs) Crude test is- one morning before you drive it take off the rad cap, full the rad right up and then start it. Let it idle while you watch the water level. If it bubbles over the top before it warms up you have compression being pushed into the radiator through the head gasket. Professional test is a leakdown test at a garage or the test kit that shows exhaust gases in the radiator. Jets would show problems in other areas. Blocked idle jet means car wont idle, blocked main would mean car coughs, lacks power, or won't run above a couple thousand RPM, blocked secondary means car won't run up top. A bit of shit in a jet would run it lean, which would overheat it, but it would be so bad you would feel the lack of power. Overheating- radiator blocked or cores had it, thermostat jamming, motor water channels full of shit, water pump knackered. As Towe said, retarded ignition leads to overheating. So now we heve educated you, you can go and find that the points need replacing and timing resetting! :laff:

A day or two back I fitted an electronic dizzy. It came via Twinky, (thankyou very much!) one of KEmotorsports units. I wired both wires to the coil, bolting one to the original dizzy wire so I could always swap back. I don't mind having a 12v live bolt hanging in the engine bay, maybe I'll fix it later! It started straight away, but when I drove away it had lost it's sparkle and felt very flat low down. I was taking it over 3000 before it started to move, so I figured it was not advancing. It took quite some thinking before I found the vac advance delay valve the mechanic had fitted when he dyno'd the car initially. Once I ran a drill through the middle of that things improved. I reset the plug gaps to 38thou and stuck a few more degrees on the timing. I don't know why the stock dizzy ran OK with that valve, I suppose the advance curves and the vac units are different. There is scope for more tuning there. Today I noticed it handles slow 3rd gear intersections when cold much better, no hesitation or misfiring, and generally runs cleaner low down. For the SU guys, I've been thinning the dashpot oil down to try and stop it running rich on accelerator/cruise, and had gone from Johnson's Baby oil (thinner than ATF) to 50:50 baby oil & turps... The other day I took the springs out and found it ran fine, just on 14.7 with a constant throttle around town, but leaned out hard as revs increased! So, the springs are more important than the dashpots in determining acceleration/ cruise mixture. The dashpot's function is over very quickly, only a second or so. Now I want lighter springs!

..like those blouses in V8Supercars who need powersteering... :laff: I wonder how much feedback they get? If you watch someone like Lowndes in slow motion he can add precisely the right amount of steering when he kicks the tail out fractionally in a hairpin. He just turns the car quicker by over-steer and takes the lock off faster, you wouldn't notice it if you watched at race speeds.

Get the $100 one- actually it cost me $75 a year back. The 4K never puts out enough power to worry it unless you plan dropping the clutch at 4500rpm or kicking it in and revving it to slide the car, both abhorrent activities! :laff: Don't forget to undo the driveshaft and leave it in the back of the gearbox, or oil will pour out all over the floor. If its not clean under there now, take it down to a DIY carwash and water-blast it. Its much nicer to work on a semi-clean car! Aligning the new clutch plate in the center of the flywheel is the hard part. Buy one of the plastic shaft tools if you can't get it right. I just assemble the clutch lightly and look down the middle with a small torch to get all the circles concentric, seems to work.

One way takes the door off the hinges, the other takes the door and the hinges off the body- Note how they shut before you take them off. If they have drooped (especially the driver's door) shape a bit of 1mm metal sheet and put it between the bottom hinge and the door to tilt the door back to where it latches cleanly.

of course, every petrol-head on a public forum does... just like politicians always tell the truth when they make promises, and police always tell the truth in court.... :laff:

You'll have to go over all the joints and check each one. The adjustment that Nissan talks about is needed bacause the two gears inside wear at the point they most touch, the 'straight ahead' position. The screw pushes one gear against the other to take up that slack, but then it is too tight when you move them off the straight-ahead position & they jam. Jack under the LCAs so the front suspension droops as little as possible and both front wheels are just up in the air. On top of that the gears wear in their bearings, the pitman arm wears and the balljoints all wear, including the outer tierod ends. While you ahve the car up stick a screwdriver in between each join and lever it up and down. If a rubber is split check carefully as the loss of grease leads to wear and failure. Two inches is far too much, youy should get it down to half an inch.

You're right- black is very hard to define a shape in. It certainly doesn't look like a lightweight car that you can sit up in and see all four corners easily, something important in placing a wheel exactly where you want it.

Google the carb- there is a lot about it on places like Alfa Romeo forums or Fiat, all the continental cars that ued them. You will need to either get an oxygen meter to check it or learn how to tell lean from rich when it dies. You'll need to learn about the idle jets, (up to nearly 3000rpm) the main fuel jets, (the rest of the midrange to top) and the air corrector jets. (they stop the top revs being too rich) Check EvanG's topic about his Weber, I posted a reference in there to a good tuning page I found one time.

Oh the irony! I'll bet you never forget how it goes together after this! If that is the solution, well done TRD !!

Ok, so a spigot bearing got rid of the bad shaking- take a bow Mr Trev! Fine vibration.. have you had the driveshaft off the diff at all? Driveshaft universals all tight? Might be flywheel/clutch balance. Clutch not gripping... is the free-play in the cable correct, or is the cable holding the pressure plate from clamping up tight?

hmmm... do you think he'll be brave enough to tell us if TRD was right and he made a major mistake?? Car Electrics 101.... Fail!~ :blush:

err... also guilty M'lud. :laff: Just left them idling and whipped the batteries over. With all these electronic computers in modern cars I don't think I'd be so keen to try it now tho'....

So are we saying that the coil dosn't feed to the dizzy at all?? That would explain the symptom!

What sort of meter are you testing with? A voltmeter or an ammeter, or a discharge meter from a battery shop? It sounds like the battery has a dud cell, so it puts out 12volts OK, but doesn't have a lot of storage capacity behind it to push out the couple of hundred amps needed for the starter motor. Try the battery in another car, or try another battery in the TE. Its possible but less likely that there is a bad connection in the wiring or solenoid that only works with some extra grunt from a second battery. The second battery doesn't add any voltage, its all still 12V.